


The True Story of What Never Happened

by AirgiodSLV



Category: Bandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-27
Updated: 2007-08-27
Packaged: 2017-10-19 02:34:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/195888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AirgiodSLV/pseuds/AirgiodSLV
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“You…wrote up the story of us going to the diner for cheese fries last week?”</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	The True Story of What Never Happened

**Author's Note:**

> For [](http://maleyka.livejournal.com/profile)[**maleyka**](http://maleyka.livejournal.com/), after the whole "FOB reads fanfiction" thing came out, because I am a slave for her. OPT OMG.

“Patrick.”

Patrick takes a second to get to the end of the sentence he’d been reading before looking up; that tone of voice means he’s actually going to have to pay attention. “Yes, Pete?”

Pete grins and squashes himself onto the couch next to Patrick, taking up an awful lot of room for someone with basically no ass. “I wrote something. Wanna read?”

“Sure.” He’s expecting lyrics, or musings on the meaning of life and the empty existence of humanity in the universe, or possibly a dirty limerick rhyming Joe Troh with blow a ho, but what he gets instead is a short story. His brow wrinkles. “You…wrote up the story of us going to the diner for cheese fries last week?”

“Yes, but pretend like you don’t know we did that.” Pete’s still grinning; that many teeth on display makes Patrick wary. “It’s a good story, right?”

Patrick doesn’t think there’s anything all that enthralling about Pete flirting with the middle-aged waitress who’d kept looking at them as if she’d been planning to call their mothers and get them home before curfew, but he nods and shrugs, because. It’s Pete. “Sure.”

Pete’s grin gets wider. “It’s _fanfiction._ ”

Patrick blinks a little. “Technically?” he says. He’s not sure it can be fanfiction if it’s not written by a fan, but he can already foresee Pete’s argument that he’s a fan of the rest of them, so he doesn’t say that. He’s also not sure that it counts if it’s _true._ “Hey,” he says, pointing to the bottom of the page. “I didn’t say anything about the coffee tasting bitter because of the sacrifices we’ve had to make to drink it.”

“No, but you could have. I elaborated. It sounds good, right?” Pete takes the paper back and skims through it again. “We spent like an hour filling in the crossword with wrong answers, no one cares about that. I needed dramatic effect. Angst.”

“I don’t angst,” Patrick objects, but Pete is already rolling off the couch.

“I’m gonna go post this now,” he calls on his way out of the lounge, and Patrick has to wait a few seconds to make sure he’s heard that correctly.

“You…what? Pete? Pete!”

  
*

  
Pete’s moping. He’s doing it with a lot of drama, scuffing his toes and sighing loudly with his chin pillowed sadly on his hands. Patrick ignores him at first, knowing that eventually he’ll get tired of sulking and just come out with whatever’s bothering him, but after ten minutes he can’t stand it anymore and gives in.

“What’s wrong?”

Pete sighs again, listing to one side so his cheek is smushed against his knuckles. “Nobody liked my story. Well, a couple of people did, but mostly I think they were just being polite.”

Patrick speaks without thinking first, something he keeps swearing he’s not going to do. “You could always write another one.”

Pete brightens. Patrick curses himself, but it’s not like it can hurt, right? It’s stories about late-night cheese fries. “You think?”

Patrick nods, and Pete goes off, presumably to find his laptop. He has a few hours or so of quiet before Pete bursts back into the lounge like a pissed-off mosquito, only twice as loud.

“I got a review. 2/5, a ‘sweet story but Pete’s characterization was off.’ What the fuck is that?” Pete crosses his arms and glares as if Patrick is responsible for this turn of events. Patrick has definitely not been online reading Pete’s fan-sort-of-fiction, though, so it’s really not his fault.

“You can’t please everybody,” he tries.

“There’s this chick, fobfan4evR69, she thinks she’s like, the expert on us, and she reviews other people’s stories and says crap like this, and I mean, what the fuck? My Pete is _perfect._ I even put in that thing I do in the mornings with the shower gel.”

Patrick opens his mouth to reply, or possibly to beg for no more information, but Pete just keeps going. “And she’s popular, her last story got, like, 53 comments, and it wasn’t even that good. You’d been kidnapped by Andy the crime lord and were being held in an abandoned warehouse and I was rescuing you, and okay, that part was pretty kick-ass, but that’s just because I knew kung-fu and karate-chopped everybody’s ass to get to you.”

Patrick waits to see if there’s more this time. Pete hurls himself onto the couch and shows every sign of settling in for a good long sulk. “Hey,” Patrick says, nudging him gently. “I liked the part where you said I looked like a bespectacled gentleman out of his time peering under his hat from another world not like this one.”

Pete broods for another few seconds, and then looks over. “Really?”

“Really,” Patrick lies sincerely.

Pete snuggles up beside him and rests his head on Patrick’s shoulder. “I’d totally save you from a warehouse if you were kidnapped,” he says quietly.

Patrick pats his hand reassuringly. “I know.”

  
*

  
“Trick. Read this for me.”

Patrick regretfully sets his book aside, folding a tissue neatly in half to mark his place, and looks up at Pete. He’s read maybe three chapters since he first picked the book up. Pete keeps finding ways to interrupt him. He hopes this is more important than the discovery of gingerbread-scented hand soap. “What is it?”

“Just read.” Pete tucks his knees up and starts chewing on his fingernail.

Patrick gets halfway through the first sentence and stops reading. “Oh come on,” he says a bit desperately. “Not again.”

“It’s better this time, I promise. Come on, I need you, you’re my beta.” Pete makes the _eyes_ , the ones that always get Patrick into trouble, and he has no idea what a beta is but he supposes now he is one. Pete needs him.

“Pass me a pen,” he sighs, and starts reading.

Half an hour later he’s circled twenty-seven typos, three paragraphs with no capitalization whatsoever, and seven places where Pete has used ‘he’ so many times that Patrick can’t tell who’s supposed to be doing what. Then he gets to what Pete has helpfully labeled ‘meanwhile, back in Chicago’ and comes to a complete stop.

“Pete,” he says with admirable calm. “Why am I moaning your name in my sleep?”

Pete looks earnest and sincere. Patrick does not trust that expression on Pete any more than he does on Brendon Urie. “You’re suffering from denial of unrequited love,” he explains. “Only it’s not unrequited, but you don’t know that, because I went to Vegas without you and you think I’m sleeping with the guitarist from Panic at the Nightclub.”

“Pete,” Patrick says patiently, and then has to stop, take his glasses off to rub his eyes, and start again. “Are you _slashing_ us?”

Pete grins, pleased that Patrick understands. “It’s much more interesting, seriously. No one reads gen, it’s like, the fluffy crap that fills in between the raunchy stuff, and you would not believe how sex-obsessed these chicks are. It needs to be, like, rated R or they won’t even read it.”

“Please tell me I don’t have sex with you in this story,” Patrick begs.

“No, you’re going to pine away while I find love in the arms of another. Only I don’t, but you don’t know that, because you left me a message while I was on the plane confessing your feelings, but my cell phone died and I lost the charger so I can’t call you, and you fear the worst and stop eating because you think I hate you now and you don’t want to live a life without me in it.”

Patrick really doesn’t want to live a life without Pete in it, but he thinks starvation is a bit extreme. “Why don’t you just call me from another phone?” he asks.

Pete waves his hand. “It’s not important. And I don’t know that you’ve left me a message telling me of your love because my phone died before I could hear it.”

“Right,” Patrick says, like it all makes sense now. “Okay.” He circles one more misspelled word and hands the bundle of papers back. “Here you go.”

“Thanks,” Pete says cheerfully, hopping up to go back to his laptop and smacking a kiss against Patrick’s cheek. “You’re the best.”

  
*

  
“What are you doing?” Patrick asks on his way to the kitchen, and hopes that the answer is something like, ‘working on lyrics,’ or ‘running my business,’ or even ‘watching kinky free porn.’

“Bill wants a love interest,” Pete answers, typing away intently. “He says he’s sick of being the one always slutting around looking ethereal in the background and he deserves his own sex scene, and if I make him the overly-friendly annoying drunk draping himself over me and making you jealous again he’s going to unfriend me.”

“He’s,” Patrick says, and then isn’t quite sure where to begin. “Bill is _reading_ these?”

“He’s usually the first one to comment,” Pete replies, saving his document with a practiced click. “His journal name is scenequeen, he’s kind of ridiculously popular for someone who only talks about how much they like our music and posts pictures of us on tour. They’re not even good pictures, really, I always look like a dork.”

Patrick chooses not to respond to that. “Why don’t you write him with you?” he asks, hoping against hope. As weird as reading sex scenes about Bill and Pete would be, it’s a lot better than reading about himself saying things like, ‘my loins are burning for you and if you don’t bring me to completion I shall die,’ which is what Pete had written yesterday before Patrick insisted he change it. Pete had looked kind of shifty when he’d agreed, so Patrick isn’t even sure he’d done it, but he’s living in blissful ignorance.

Pete is looking at him in horror. “Patrick,” he says, scandalized. “I can’t break us up. We are oh-tee-pee.”

“Oh,” Patrick says faintly. He’s kind of pleased by that in spite of himself. “Thanks.”

“I’m giving him Travis,” Pete continues, back to typing out another scene. “That way I can put Treckett in the headers. Gabe will get a kick out of it. And then I can bring in the crossover crowd, maybe my comments will go up. I still only got 22 on my last one.”

“Pete,” Patrick says carefully. “You realize you’re looking for validation from teenaged girls by posting stories about yourself on the internet.”

Pete grins at him. “I write stories about myself all the time. You put a guitar behind it and we sell 3 million copies.”

Patrick doesn’t actually have a response to that. He does, however, have a question about the words he sees over Pete’s shoulder. “You’re calling us _p-squared?_ ”

“Fuck yeah, isn’t it cool? I tried Petrick for a while, but I like this better. Oh hey, while you’re here, look at this.” Pete shrinks the window and types in a url. Patrick finds himself looking at a header spread of Pete’s hips in black leather and a faded background of a familiar shirtless torso covered in tattoos. “I redid my journal layout, what do you think?”

“I think,” Patrick says weakly, and after several seconds of coming up with nothing, finally finishes, “It looks good.” He stares for a few more seconds, and then adds, “ilvryro?”

“Isn’t it awesome? I can’t believe no one had it already. I was going to use bden_rocks, but apparently he has more fans. Or at least ones using his name in creative ways. Go figure.” Pete twists around in his seat and brings the document up again. Patrick watches him type ‘Chapter 32/?’ at the top of the page and makes a conscious decision to walk away while he still can.

  
*

  
“Patrick. _Patrick._ ”

Patrick makes a noise that sounds like ‘ermrumph’ and flails out wildly with one arm to smack the arm trying to poke him into wakefulness. It doesn’t go away, but the voice sounds encouraged by his response.

“Hey,” it whispers loudly. “If I told you I had a terrible wasting disease caused by overdosing on antidepressants due to my years of serious self-esteem issues, and I only had a day left to live, would you try to make the most of it with gentle and tender lovemaking until the sun came up and we had to part and you remembered me fondly for the rest of your days, or would you have passionate and fierce animal sex with me until the sun came up before slitting your wrists so we could die together like star-crossed young lovers?”

“Pete,” Patrick says into his pillow without opening his eyes. “Have you been watching Moulin Rouge again?”

“No,” Pete says. “Well, yes. But seriously, how would you react? I don’t want you to be o-o-c.”

Patrick keeps his eyes squeezed shut and hopes that Pete will think he’s fallen back asleep and give up. He knows better by now, but he tries anyway.

“Patrick.” The poking finger is back. Patrick thinks dreamily of biting it, but that would require moving. “I need you. fobfan4evR69 got 67 comments on her last story, and the sex wasn’t even that good. I write way better gay sex than she does, she always has too much kissing and soft touching. Like, who the fuck spends that long on foreplay anyway? Patrick.”

“Go away,” Patrick says clearly, although he says it into the pillow so it comes out slightly muffled.

“It’s because she had a spanking scene,” Pete continues, not going away. “Everybody loves those. I’ll bet if I had a spanking scene, I’d get more comments too. Hey, or maybe bondage. How do you feel about nipple clamps?”

The surge of horror manages to jerk Patrick fully awake. “You are not writing a bondage scene about me,” he says firmly, trying to look as stern as possible when he doesn’t have his glasses on and Pete is just a blurry shadow. “We are not having any more fictional sex. I would slit my wrists to get away from that. Gay sex is…is the O.C.”

There’s silence, and Patrick thinks for an instant that he’s gotten his point across before he starts to worry that he’s upset Pete, but then Pete leaps up so fast he smacks his head on the top of the bunk and crows.

“That’s it! Gang raped by Cobra Starship in Gabe’s basement! You can’t stand the idea of facing me after the shame, and you kill yourself before I can get to you to tell you that I still love you! No wait, shit, I should nurse you back to health first, that way we can develop a bond and you can realize the depth of your love for me, and _then_ you kill yourself, like, while I’m out buying a box of jelly donuts for the two of us to share because they’re your favourite. Fuck, yes!”

Patrick makes a noise of distress. He wonders if there’s anyone he can call who will be sympathetic and not laugh their ass off at him. Probably not. Andy and Joe have been offering suggestions for future plot twists, and Brendon just sent Patrick a text congratulating him on how beautiful it was when he got married to Pete under the stars on the beach. Since Patrick does not remember marrying Pete at all, much less under the stars on the beach, he suspects it means that Panic! is following Pete’s online literary career with interest.

“I’ve gotta go,” Pete says, and Patrick would be grateful for that if he weren’t now awake and imagining them getting married in leather bondage gear with all of their friends in attendance. He’s going to have nightmares about this, he can feel it.

“Mmmph,” Patrick responds weakly.

“Hey,” Pete says softly, petting his hair when Patrick falls back onto the pillow. “Does kissing you taste like raspberries and sunshine?”

Patrick considers whimpering. “No,” he says instead. Firmly.

Pete laughs. “I didn’t think so,” he says, and his lips press warm and soft against Patrick’s temple. “Night, Trick.”

Patrick makes a noise in response, but he’s already halfway asleep.

  
*

  
“97 comments!” Pete yells, and Patrick is startled into banging his hand on the lip of the counter. Motherfucker.

Pete comes racing into the room, fists raised in triumph and grinning with way too many teeth. “I did it! I beat her! My story is the best, _and_ I won a ‘Patrick loves Pete’ fic contest!”

“Please tell me that means this is over,” Patrick says, to keep from thinking too much about the quality of the other stories entered in this contest.

“Totally,” Pete agrees, wrapping his arms around Patrick’s waist and leaning his head against Patrick’s shoulder. It’s nice. “Hey, you know what we should do? Like, to celebrate?”

Patrick feels a vague sense of dread creeping up his spine. “Please don’t say…”

“We should have sex,” Pete announces, and that…that is much worse than anything Patrick could have possibly imagined.

“What?” he manages finally, which sounds slightly better than, _have you lost your fucking mind?_

“I mean, it was really good in the stories, even when it was our first time and you were a shy virgin.” Pete sighs, obviously remembering, and Patrick tightens his hold on the counter. “I figure we should at least give it a try.”

Patrick thinks fast. “I can’t,” he says quickly. “I’m pining away from unrequited love, and that would ruin it. I, uh, really like unrequited love. It’s nice. I think we should stick with that.”

Pete’s still for a moment, and then he laughs, arms squeezing tight around Patrick’s waist. “Okay,” he says. “As long as I can still call us p-squared.”

“Oh-pee-tee,” Patrick proclaims solemnly, craning his neck so he can affectionately nudge Pete’s head.

Pete looks up at him and grins, eyes crinkling at the corners. “Yeah,” he says fondly. “Something like that.”


End file.
